Future Wise

Educating Our Children for a Changing World

David Perkins

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118844083
• eBook ISBN: 9781118844076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

How to teach big understandings and the ideas that matter most

Everyone has an opinion about education, and teachers face pressures from Common Core content standards, high-stakes testing, and countless other directions. But how do we know what today's learners will really need to know in the future? Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World is a toolkit for approaching that question with new insight. There is no one answer to the question of what's worth teaching, but with the tools in this book, you'll be one step closer to constructing a curriculum that prepares students for whatever situations they might face in the future.

K-12 teachers and administrators play a crucial role in building a thriving society. David Perkins, founding member and co-director of Project Zero at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, argues that curriculum is one of the most important elements of making students ready for the world of tomorrow. In Future Wise, you'll learn concepts, curriculum criteria, and techniques for prioritizing content so you can guide students toward the big understandings that matter.

• Understand how learners use knowledge in life after graduation
• Learn strategies for teaching critical thinking and addressing big questions
• Identify top priorities when it comes to disciplines and content areas
• Gain curriculum design skills that make the most of learning across the years of education

Future Wise presents a brand new framework for thinking about education. Curriculum can be one of the hardest things for teachers and administrators to change, but David Perkins shows that only by reimagining what we teach can we lead students down the road to functional knowledge. Future Wise is the practical guidebook you need to embark on this important quest.

Chapter 1
Lifeworthy Learning: Where Knowledge Goes in Learners’ Lives

When fourth graders, high school sophomores, or college freshmen ask, “Why do we need to know this?” we know what they are worried about. They don’t see the meaningfulness of the topic on the table, at least not the meaningfulness for them. They’d like to feel that what they’re learning today is knowledge for the future. They’d like to feel that it would contribute significantly to the lives they are likely to live. They are looking for what might be called, to borrow a phrase from business, return on investment (ROI), not just in monetary but in any terms—professional, civic, family, involvement with the arts, or understanding better the world we encounter daily.

Sometimes they are wrong to be skeptical. They can’t see beyond the horizon of the week or month to how a particular bundle of knowledge might serve them well in the future in some way.

But sometimes they may be right. They may share an unease expressed by John Dewey in his 1916 work, Democracy and Education: “Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.” They may well suspect that the complicated steps of mitosis (the process of asexual cell division, in case you’ve forgotten), details of the Boxer Uprising (in China at the end of the eighteenth century, opposing Western intrusions and influences), or multiple linear equations will not come up significantly or even often in the lives they are likely to live.

Likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live: that’s a very useful phrase, but it’s also a bit of a mouthful. So let’s attach a single word to it: lifeworthy, that is, likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live.

Lifeworthy as Key

What’s lifeworthy learning is a broad qualitative judgment, and it’s one that young students in particular are not in a very good position to make. The complaining students might be right or wrong for that moment. But certainly the question of lifeworthiness is right for education broadly. How often is a particular fact, understanding, or skill likely to come up? With what importance? Would it grow in breadth and depth and significance over time—or do we simply forget it?

When teachers expand the range of education to explore those six beyonds—introducing twenty-first-century skills, new advances in the disciplines, interdisciplinary studies, and so on—they display a concern with lifeworthy learning. They foresee that a curriculum of much wider than traditional scope speaks more powerfully to the lives learners are likely to live.

Indeed, educating for lifeworthy learning has always been central to what makes human beings human. David Christian, writing about “big history” (which begins with the big bang and progresses by stages to the emergence of humans, early civilizations, and modernity), contrasts humans with other primates. Creatures like chimpanzees, for example, bright as they are in some ways, are living today essentially the same way that they did 1 million years ago. If, for an interesting measure, you estimate the share of energy they use from the overall flow of energy from the sun striking Earth, it remains essentially the same per chimp.

The story is radically different for human beings. Contemporary lifeways for human beings are hardly anything like their lifeways of 100,000 or even 500 years ago. The average energy use by each human and his or her activities (including electricity, heating, and goods that required energy for their manufacture) is several orders of magnitude higher than the energy share of our human ancestors, an attainment that comes with a dark side: our huge and precarious impact on the environment.

What has made this possible? Big brains? Sure. Speech? Certainly. The later development of writing? Absolutely. But most centrally, Christian urges, it is collective learning—in other words, education in its broadest sense of passing on lifeworthy learning to others. It’s this that has allowed the human species to share, accumulate, and extend knowledge generation after generation. It’s this that enables people today to search for the Higgs boson in physics or live out parts of their lives in Second Life, the vast online environment that itself constitutes a kind of culture, or simply have coffee at Starbucks made from beans from the other side of the world. Chimpanzees and a number of other creatures learn quite well, even with a measure of insight, but they show very little collective learning.

Education in its broadest sense gives knowledge much more of a lifeworthy future than it would otherwise have, dying with the learner. Early forms of education—the young in hunter-gatherer groups at the feet of the elders, the private tutors of the Roman elite, apprenticeship practices in the medieval guilds—sought in various ways to leverage collective learning toward a greater return on investment. Today’s educational systems, despite our complaints that they are not doing as well as we would like, have a breadth simply astounding by the measure of even the recent past. Participation in education, as student, as teacher, as parent, as planner, as policymaker, as developer of materials, is participation in a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human.

Lifeworthy at Risk

Recognizing this, we also need to recognize a weirdness in formal education today that goes back to the uppity question. The lifeworthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty. It seems not to have been thought through very carefully.

The default mind-set goes something like this: “These are the things good to know. After all, they are there in the textbooks, and someone put them in the textbooks for some reason.” So most educational initiatives focus on signs of short-term success: doing well on assignments and scoring well on tests in the course of the school year, without much thinking about the long-term return on investment.

A more sophisticated defense of at least some conventional education would go something like this: “These ideas are fundamental to our understanding of the world; they figure centrally in science, history, mathematics, literature.” That’s certainly better than “someone put them in the textbooks.” However, what if many of these ideas, central though they might be to particular disciplines or professions, hardly ever come up in significant ways in the lives most learners are likely to live? Are they truly worth learning?

It depends what we mean by worth. Maybe they are worth learning in some intrinsic sense, that is, good to know in principle. But that answer works only if they stay known. The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives—personal, artistic, civic, something else. Overwhelmingly knowledge unused is forgotten. It’s gone. Whatever its intrinsic value might be, it can’t be lifeworthy unless it’s there.

Maybe we need to get beyond a presumptive “good to know.” Knowledge is good to know only if there are occasions that call on it and keep it alive and available. To be worth knowing, knowledge has to go somewhere.

When Lifeworthy Thrives

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Try This

What did you learn during your first twelve years of education that matters in your life today?

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You might find it interesting to take a minute to jot down two or three topics or skills in answer to this question. But don’t make it too easy for yourself. Let’s not count basic literacy and numeracy. Of course, those figure all the time in people’s lives. They are lifeworthy learning, no question. Such basics are not at issue here.

At the other end of education, let’s not count specifically professional knowledge. I’m reminded here of the Gary Larson cartoon where, in the midst of surgery, one surgeon wonders aloud how many chambers the heart has. Of course, specifically professional learning is lifeworthy for that life. So not counting the most basic basics and not counting professional knowledge, what did you learn that matters in your life today?

To ask such a question is to look for knowledge that has already yielded a return on investment in our own experience. I’ve put this query informally to several dozen individuals over the past several years. The good news is that people often have exciting and even inspiring answers.

Here are a couple of favorite examples. One person pointed to the French Revolution, about the last thing I would have expected to hear, since my student experience of the French Revolution gave me little to celebrate. But here was this person’s comment: “Through the French Revolution, I was able to understand the generalities of world conflict—for instance, how the lack of freedom, poverty, overtaxation, weak economies, the struggle between the Church and state, or social inequity has always been a reason to engage in war.” Clearly for this learner, the French Revolution became much more than a pile of facts. It functioned as a lens through which he could see the troubles of the world in many other venues. For him, it was certainly lifeworthy learning.

Here is another example: “Understanding of energy and climate change issues . . . has not only proven useful in everything from everyday decisions about my transport and consumer choices, but also in political decisions, social interactions, and life philosophy.” We live in an age of ecological concern, but it’s questionable how many people take the dilemmas of our planet to heart. This person plainly does, and schooling contributed to the mind-set.

What people have to say about knowledge that has been important to them ranges from historical perspectives through ecological concerns to political responsibility, leadership skills, and on and on. Here’s yet another example:

Throughout my life thus far, music and performing arts has been a significant part of life through lessons, performances, and competitions. . . . These experiences and learning offered an outlet from my traditional schooling and allowed me to develop discipline, analytical skills, focus, and expression. Furthermore, my involvement with dance and music offered me opportunities to interact with others and develop collaboration, effective listening, and leadership skills. These are skills that are needed in any organization, not just an orchestra, a dance ensemble, or a nonprofit arts organization. I have utilized what I have learned and applied them in business, school, and every other setting that I have encountered.

Of course, these examples celebrate the experience of particular individuals. Other students with very similar school experiences might not have made nearly as much of them. However, the point is that learning about the French Revolution or ecological concerns or the arts carries the potential for knowledge that lasts and matters to people’s lives.

Moreover, a close look at these examples reveals a key ingredient: these learners all generalized the significance of their experiences well beyond the obvious reach, to other facets of the world and to aspects of their personal beliefs and behavior.

When Lifeworthy Falters

The quadratic equation, that venerable and universal feature of algebra 1, offers a cautionary tale. Here’s an activity I have done with a number of groups in various parts of the world.

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Try This

1. Question 1. How many people in the room at one time or another in the course of their precollege education studied quadratic equations? [Here, virtually all the hands in the room go up. Did your hand go up?]
2. Question 2. How many people have used a quadratic equation in the last ten years? [Here, maybe only 5 percent or 10 perce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Learning for Tomorrow
• Chapter 1: Lifeworthy Learning
• Chapter 2: Learning Agendas
• Chapter 3: Big Understandings
• Chapter 4: Big Questions
• Chapter 5: Lifeready Learning
• Chapter 6: The Seven Seas of Knowledge
• Chapter 7: Ways of Knowing
• Chapter 8: Buckets of Knowledge
• Chapter 9: Big Know-How
• Chapter 10: Knowledge on the Way to Wisdom
• Notes
• Index
• End User License Agreement